Orion RAN Slicing System

X E N O F O N F O U K A S *†, M A H E S H K . M A R I N A *, K I M O N KO N TO VA S I L I S †

*The University of Edinburgh † NCSR “Demokritos”

Service-oriented 5G view

Towards a service-oriented architecture

Conventional One-size Fits AllMobile Network Architecture

Fixed and Rigid Flexible and Customizable

End-to-end Network Slicing Architecture

Our contribution: Orion

Orion RAN slicing system

Functional and Performance Isolation

Efficient sharing of radio and spectrum resources

Orion Overview

Orion RAN slicing system

Functional and Performance Isolation

Efficient sharing of radio and spectrum

resources

Physical Base StationInfrastructure provider

◦ Owner of physical base stations◦ Radio equipment

◦ Memory

◦ CPU

◦ Network

◦ Spectrum

Single Radio Access Technology per base station

◦ Resources exploited through single physical layer

Orion Hypervisor

Partitions radio resources among slices◦ Based on service requirements

Virtualizes radio resources and data plane state

◦ Ensures radio resource isolation

Performs slice bookkeeping operations

Maps UEs to slices

Slice Virtual Control Plane

Isolated Virtual Network Functions

(Containers, VMs...)

Decoupled control & data plane

Slice Flexibility/Configurability

Slice 1 controllerLoad Balancing

Slice 1 controllerLoad Balancing

Slice 2 controllerQoS optimization

Slice 2 controller

Slice 2 controller

Orion Hypervisor

Orion Hypervisor

Orion Hypervisor

Orion Hypervisor

Orion DemonstrationCreation and operation of RAN slices

◦ Dynamic slice creation through configuration files

◦ VNF placement & chaining◦ Different EPC configurations (shared EPC/MOCN)

◦ Co-located/Distributed Virtual control planes

◦ Slice monitoring◦ Demonstration of data plane state isolation among slices

Slice radio resource isolation◦ Creation of slices with different radio resource requirements

◦ Best effort

◦ Average throughput

◦ Static resource block allocation

Demonstration Topology

Outstanding IssuesInconsistency in achieved DL throughput when using LimeSDR compared to other SDR solutions

◦ Same behavior for both vanilla OpenAirInterface and Orion

◦ When using iperf3 to generate traffic for a single TCP flow we observe the following behavior:

◦ Achieved throughput can have great variability when using LimeSDR with single TCP flow

Problem was partially resolved with the calibration of the LimeSDR unit (OAI configuration file)

To fully overcome the issue for the demo, we generated multiple parallel TCP flows with iperf3 per UE◦ 10 parallel TCP flows instead of a single flow per UE

Vanilla OpenAirInterface Orion

LimeSDR 10-16Mbps 4-12 Mbps

USRP B210 16Mbps 12-14 Mbps